Pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration.

Planetary, Day 2

Our first iPad app Planetary launched yesterday and can be downloaded for free from the App Store. We had a great day responding to feedback and requests from our first users and watching the waves of positive responses roll in on Twitter and elsewhere. We’re both humbled and proud to be getting all this attention, especially on such a busy news day.

The video is also a great opportunity to showcase the music of Zoë Keating. Robert is lucky enough to have collaborated with Zoë in live performances such as last year’s In The Trees from Zer01 San Jose. If you like what you hear in our video then be sure to try the full album.

Share this:

Like this:

20 Comments on “Planetary, Day 2”

Love Planetary, thank you so much! I love it to the point that I want it on OSX iTunes as the visualizer so I can use playlists and “shuffle.” Playlists could be galaxies… just sayin’. I’d pay 10 dollars for it, and I’m not kidding. Thanks again for a beautiful app!

Hi D – Planetary currently inherits shuffle settings from the built-in iPod player app. If you disable shuffle there and then tap the first moon/track orbiting a planet/album then everything should play in order. Good luck!

Hey JeffG, that’s right, Planetary was made with Cinder for iOS. That should make it easier to port to other platforms in the future, though the music access is quite closely tied to the ipod library at the moment so it might take us a while to sort everything out.

Per some of the other requests here, I have a suggestion. I’d really like to have a “navigate by” mode. (The current mode being “filter by”.) In “navigate by” mode, when I get to a planet I see all the tracks on that album. I have a lot of soundtracks in my collection and this would be really helpful.

It would be even better if I could “warp” to the solar system for the artist of the selected moon in that scenario.

Really great app. Congrats! I’m rediscovering tracks I’ve ignored for a long time.

We’d like to bring Planetary to other platforms soon but we haven’t done it yet! Our use of the Cinder framework should make our code easy to port when we do. For now Planetary is quite closely tied to the ipod library code and designed for gesture input on a tablet-sized display. Each new version will need adjusting carefully to meet expectations set by the platform and our first iPad version. We definitely want to do it, we just need some time to make sure we do it right!

I’ve just started playing with the app and it look great and has me very excited.

I immediately wonder though if there are plans to tie Planetary into more sophisticated networks for analyzing and exploring music? Alphabetical constellations seem so terribly limited. I would love to see constellations based upon the links between various groups and musicians, something more akin to last.fm but visual.

For example, in my library Planetary made a link between Alec Empire and Alec Empire vs Merzbow, but there is no direct link between Alec Empire and his band Atari Teenage Riot.

The old music network maps and visualizations seem like a fantastic direction to take Planetary helping users to find connections they may not have realized within their own music libraries and pointing them toward new starts and constellations outside their direct library.

Hey Rados – try doing a full sync with iTunes, or try restarting your iPad. We’ve also heard that Planetary won’t work on jailbroken iPads, sorry if that affects you. Failing that please email us planetary@bloom.io and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks!